Then came the Phoenicians’ great conceptual leap. They were maritime traders who were constantly crossing paths with people who spoke different languages. They developed a script associating various marks not to items in the world, of which there are billions, but to sounds humans could make, of which there are only a few dozen. With this tool, the Phoenicians could record how people on some strange shore said hello, and the next time they visited, they could get the interaction off to a good start by saying hello in the local language.
